Feeding your TRIRIGA information needs

Tag Archives: Campus

How does the University of California plan to manage their property assets across 10 campuses? By implementing an impressive new program called ICAMP – the Integrated Capital Asset Management Program. We caught up with Rich Powers, of the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) to find out how ICAMP enables visibility and integration across campus systems, and promotes efficient asset lifecycle management, too…

Defining the key elements of ICAMP

The ICAMP solution contains three solutions, all of which come together to support better decision-making:

IBM TRIRIGA Cloud

RSMeans

FieldFLEX Mobile.

UCOP chose the TRIRIGA platform to bring together all of their asset data into one integrated system. TRIRIGA lets you create a building inventory and location hierarchy. It has the capabilities required to manage those buildings throughout their lifecycle. Crucially, it supports facility condition assessment, or FCA. This is how they access every building component, from floor to ceiling, for health and performance. By using TRIRIGA, Rich’s team can overlay their building inventory with the FCA data to see which assets are most at risk, or in need of maintenance.

By combining this information with industry data from RSMeans, the team is able to estimate potential repair costs, then kick off opportunities from within TRIRIGA. UCOP also built a mobile FCA application with FieldFLEX Mobile that makes TRIRIGA available to technicians in the field. This carries the advantage of a streamlined inspection and assessment process. It allows architectural, electrical, and mechanical inspectors to look at their respective inventory elements and access asset data with ease. The application supports storing floor plans, uploading photos and videos, geo-tagging buildings and assets, and cross-referencing lifecycle data to help inspectors make better real-time assessments across the portfolio…

The U.S. Department of Energy defines a zero energy building (ZEB) as one that produces enough renewable energy (electricity, fuel combustion) to meet its own annual energy consumption requirements. The building terms “net zero energy” and “zero net energy” are synonymous and are broadly used in the industry.

Energy consumption is averaged over a one-year period. The measurement of energy consumed and energy exported is highly dependent on the site boundary, which could encompass a single building or a cluster of buildings. Not just a building, but a campus, a portfolio, or a community can be zero energy.

Title IV of the Energy Independence and Security Act draws a line in the sand, challenging the building industry — which accounts for 38 percent of total U.S. energy consumption, according to DOE — to build net-zero only buildings after 2025 and retrofit pre-2025 buildings to net-zero by 2050.

California, the world’s environmental leader, has set more aggressive goals, requiring all new residential buildings to be ZNE by 2020, new commercial buildings to be ZNE by 2030, and 50 percent of existing commercial buildings retrofit to ZNE by 2030. Both the federal government and California acknowledge that the zero-net energy goals are ambitious, pointing to the elimination of fossil fuel combustion for generation of heat and hot water as very difficult to implement…

Whenever I talk to my nephews, nieces and other people who I know are currently studying at university or at a higher education college, they always complain about how busy the university library gets. This is hardly surprising considering the research carried out by the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), which found that over the past 15 years the number of students has grown by 22% and the number of staff has increased by 4%. Consequently, educational institutions are now faced with the challenges of satisfying both students and staff and making efficient use of available space…

The role of the campus is changing

As a result of these continual developments, the needs of students and staff who visit campus is starting to change at break-neck speed. More than ever, real estate managers need to have tools to help them predict what kind of campus will be needed in the future. To make matters even more difficult, real estate contracts usually span long periods of time.

If you want to be able to respond dynamically to changing needs, it might be a good idea to start thinking about different types of contracts, investing in new premises, renovation and refurbishment and other potential commercial models to help you get the most out of your buildings. Key questions here are: what will bring people to campus in the years to come, what will students and staff expect from their working environment and what kind of spaces would meet these expectations? To put it simply, what role will the campus play in the future?

Real estate managers can take student and staff preferences into account when making strategic real estate choices, but they can also base their decisions on facts and figures. In my previous blog about the Internet of Things, I mentioned that data collection can yield surprising insights. You discover trends and usage patterns you never knew existed. For a real estate manager, for example, it’s very useful to know which study areas on campus are the most and least popular…